The article also made me realize that I am not in touch with any of my former teachers.  After reading, I found my old AP Government teacher on Facebook and sent a friend request.  His page didn’t allow me to send a message, so hopefully he’ll see the name and remember me–but I was his student 17 years ago.

Here’s the trailer.  I haven’t figured out how to embed it yet.

1. Prepare to implement my KMWP research into my curriculum map for the year.  Everything we did was packaged for an audience of teachers; now I just have to rework it so that I can deliver it to students.

2. Revamp my vocabulary instruction.  I’ve been teaching SAT vocabulary for a few years now, mainly because my seniors are freaked out about the big test.  Generally, they do see the words on the test are grateful for the vocabulary.  What surprised me recently, however, was a former student’s comment that the SAT vocabulary helped her during her freshman year of college as well. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but it does make me wonder how I can gear second-semester vocabulary towards preparing seniors for that first year of college.  I hope to have word lists and quizzes (up to a full year’s worth?) ready to go by August.

3. Continue in my professional reading.  My upcoming education-related reads are not organized under any particular umbrella, and they vary widely in ideology.  I just started Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind (and I’ll probably comment on that soon), and after that, I’m thinking Jacques Barzun’s Begin Here, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and (for something more practical) Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading.  Then I have to figure out how to take the best ideas I encounter and work them into my classroom.

4. Student leadership stuff.  I don’t know much about this yet; I just know I’ve been asked to help out with it.

5. Keep writing!  I’ve always modeled my reading life for my students, and I look forward to figuring out how to model a writing life for them.  Now I just have to cultivate a writing life…

6.  Keep blogging.  So far, that seems to be going okay.

All of this work contributes to my effectiveness as a teacher, and it will keep me very busy.  And although I will still have a paycheck at the end of the month, that will be for work performed during the school year, not for the work I’m doing now.

That science-fictional distance is also why it’s important for students to know about the real dystopian society that is  North Korea.  I’m encouraged that this year’s winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction is Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea.  I haven’t read the book, but I would be shocked if it was anything but a compelling look at just how oppressed that nation is.  I’m excited to get my hands on a copy and possibly share it with my classes.

If any of this interests you, I’d also recommend Guy DeLisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang, in which the author-artist details his own business trip to North Korea.  DeLisle’s artwork portrays the bizarre, egomaniacal urban planning and architecture of the city in a seriocomic light, and his empathy for the North Korean people (supposedly among the saddest in the world) keeps readers from simply hating the country.  It might be the only place on earth I could describe as tragically fascinating.

By the way, I went to the school’s website.  You know what’s funny?  Their limited facilities force them to have their athletic program at a local park.  No big deal, but wait: what if I’m tired of public parks?

Teaching, I was coming to understand, was a kind of romance.  You didn’t just work with words or a chronicle of dates or facts about the suspension of protein in milk.  You wooed kids with these things, invited a relationship of sorts, the terms of connection being the narrative, the historical event, the balance of casein and water.  Maybe nothing was “intrinsically interesting.”  Knowledge gained its meaning, at lest initially, through a touch on the shoulder, through a conversation…My first enthusiasm about writing came because I wanted a teacher to like me (102).

I suppose this ties in with my earlier reflection comparing teaching and cooking.  Students need to know more than just how to do something.  They also need to know that it matters, and the teacher’s concern for them is the first sign that it does.   It’s easier for teachers to be concerned and win students over if they’re passionate about both their subject matter and their students.  Rose had a few dynamic teachers who introduced him to the Beat writers, Albert Camus, Abraham Maslow, and tons of other thinkers, all of whom were challenging to read.  Rose’s teachers, though, had a contagious passion for ideas that was easy for Rose and his friends to catch.  I hope I can fill my career with that kind of outbreak.

I wonder if we do the same thing with best practices.  Researchers (or administrators, or curriculum coordinators) enter a class looking for what makes a great teacher tick.  They write down their observations, thereby legitimizing them, and other experts or bosses proclaim what the teacher does as “best practices.”  But can other professionals recreate what happened in the original kitchen?

What really confounds Buford is that the kitchen staff never measures a single ingredient–recipes take a pinch of this or a handful of that.  This is particularly frustrating when he attempts to make polenta, a deceptively simple food.  Polenta takes three things: cornmeal, water, and time.  But how much of each?  Every set of instructions–even the ones on the bag–is misleading.  “It’s not so much water and so much polenta and so much time,” Buford writes, “but water and polenta and time, in whatever quantities it takes, until the dish is ready, which is never forty minutes but as long as three hours.”  Apparently polenta doesn’t cook itself quickly, and it requires effort unique to a given situation.  Just like true teaching and learning?

While certain principles and methods may arise from a great classroom and be transferable elsewhere, what made magic happen can never be duplicated as accurately as others would like.  The magic comes when you add yourself.  As teachers, we can borrow best practices all we want, but sooner or later, we have to be ourselves.  Our comfort with that inevitability may be a major determinant of our success in the classroom.  We can’t just ask what we’re doing; we must also ask how we can make it our own.

My wife kept a consistently updated blog for several months.  Her interests are food and gardening, so she posted meal plans and photos of her work.  Then she quit for a while; then she started another blog, Domestipunk.  The name really suits her.  It seems that when she keeps it up, though, that she puts a lot of work into it, that it can take a solid hour or more of her time almost every day.  I may still keep up with this, but I also need to figure out how to manage my time so that I can do it.  And my fiction writing, which has lagged during the Institute, still has to take priority.

Sabrina’s presentation today was a reminder that respecting students’ culture is perhaps the easiest way into their hearts.  By taking seriously elements of hip hop sneered at or misunderstood by the mainstream, Sabrina cracked open a world of art and ideas and recognized its inherent meaning for its devotees and the rest of society.  The ideas behind the demo are transferable to any student subculture.  I’m reminded of the punk aesthetic, which in some circles still stands for questioning authority and proposing alternatives to corrupt or unjust policy.  Maybe I can bring some of that in next year.